Category Archives: IT problems and solutions

How do you reach out for help when writing and selling your books? A good publisher will have blogs and forums where you can interconnect with fellow authors. But sadly , and despite administrator requests, these all too often get taken over by blatant author promo rather than advice and help. Listen and help other authors with their writing and marketing problems and you are more likely to make friends and perhaps even sell some books.

Amazon Again

The book marketing scene is continually changing–the latest move is toward social media advertising, and if you’re an Amazon author, AMS ads. The ever-enthusiastic Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur.com has brought out a free set of training videos on marketing with Amazon ads for everyone as technically challenged as me. I keep meaning to watch them as everything I have learned through him so far has been more than useful. Highly recommended.

Facebook can be a bit of a timewaster but it also hosts some marvellous private groups for writers and self-publishers where you can get help and advice from the best in the business.

To http or not to http

padlock courtesy of Stuart Miles at www.freedigitalphotos.net

And,of course, the big news which you ignore at your peril if you want people to find your site on the Internet. Google has warned time and again and is now taking action. Change your site from a http:// prefix to the secure https:// site which shows a safe green padlock on the address bar and carries a trust certificate.

You may see no reason to change if you’re not selling anything directly from your pages. But even if you only collect email addresses for your newsletter, you have the responsibility to provide data protection for anyone who signs up on your site.

With so many SSL certificate providers in the business, adding the secure socket layer is cheaper than it used to be and can even come free through sites like Cloudflare or Let’s Encrypt.

This being a site shared with my provider ipage.com–its nameappears in my url–it is entitled to a free https prefix but my .com sites are not.

ALLI Conference News

Speakers at the Book Expo Indie Author Fringe at the New York Book Fair are lining up to give presentations on how to sell your book. It’s a free online event all day on June 3 and not to be missed.

Presentations will be recorded for YouTube just in case 24 hours of web-watching is too great a surfeit of pleasure.

Sadly web-site ownership does not always run as smoothly as a potter’s wheel. Updates and new plug-ins can disrupt files dramatically.

I am at last having to learn about running a WordPress site for myself and fixing the behind-the-scenes codes for optimum performance.

A couple of posts and the contact pages and forms are temporarily deleted but I’m hoping to have everything restored and fully working by December.

I am also pondering how best to follow the EU cookies law. At present, as far as I know, this site does not add cookies– I certainly don’t. Word Press , I believe, may add a tracking cookie if you log in but as there is no log in access, that should not apply.

Zaxaa is building a good reputation as a shopping cart platform. And if you’re selling your own e-books directly from your website rather than through a link to Amazon or your publisher, it might be worth checking out. Its instant automation service is free though you do pay a small percentage on sales.

Followers claim it is one of the easiest to use sales platforms. And better still, unlike many other free services i’ve been checking out, it does not email your customers. Your email list is your own.

If you’re into affiliate marketing, it helps you recruit affiliates to help sell your products and to find products you can sell as an affiliate.

Warning re changes in VAT

EU Vat changes are creating headaches across the board for any small business trying to sell e-books, tutorials, courses, directly in the European marketplace.

I’m not sure how well publicized this has been. I only found out completely by accident through a writer in France who stopped selling her writing courses online because of the new laws.

As I understand it, if we sell to anywhere in Europe, we must charge the VAT applied by the country in which our buyer lives–a headache as each of the many countries has its own VAT rules and percentage charges.

For this reason, more beleaguered small businesses are selling through sales platforms which then make it easier to calculate the tax due or even take responsibility for deducting and paying the tax to the proper authorities.

Written by an Internet Marketer, this article published on the website Gain Higher Ground at the beginning of the year is one of the best and clearest I found to explain the problem.

New: Affiliate links

Any products I recommend I have bought. But in some cases, I may have received a review copy. Those which have affiliate links may compensate me if you make a purchase.
Neither of those situations lead to you paying extra for a product purchase, or to me giving a
favorable review or recommendation of a product that I think is not up to standard.

Life lessons in editing, writing, and marketing

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